48 Hours, 400 Videos — and 98% Within Class Schedules

The University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business had found an opportunity to help set its students apart.

As part of a curriculum review the school had heard industry feedback that its students were sharp — but needed to be better presenters. The school quickly set course to change that, creating a new course that could be a total presentation laboratory where students could experiment, self-review and, finally, learn how to succeed as presenters.

Looking for the right technology to help make the class possible, the school turned to Panopto.

Using Panopto, the Sauder School of Business created 400 videos in about 2 days — and 98% within existing class schedules. Then they repeated this process throughout the semester.

So how did it go?

The success of the test class — and all of the classes that followed — made believers out of everyone.

“At first the students were a little concerned about being filmed,” said Morrell. “But since there’s just a small camera, it’s not intimidating. And they love the ability to do self-reviews.”

Along with giving students a new tool to help themselves practice and learn, Panopto was a benefit to the school’s instructors.

Recording the presentations made it possible to review each student’s performance at a later time, after class is over. Video also freed up the instructor to work with individual groups while other presentations are being delivered elsewhere. And since presentations were recorded individually, professors can objectively review each student’s work in full and provide more in-depth comments and feedback.

A third major benefit of the system, said the team, was its cost. With no expensive A/V team or special equipment required, and with the ability to record the students in six different meeting rooms simultaneously, Panopto wasn’t just the most cost-effective solution Sauder found — it’s the only one that makes what they’re doing even possible.

The Vision Expands: The Future of Video at Sauder

Three semesters and more than 1,000 successful class participants later, Sauder is just starting to explore all of the possibilities of the Panopto video platform.

Now, in addition to using Panopto for creating and sharing webinars and capturing remote events, other instructors have taken notice of the system and begun to request it for their class presentations as well.

“For our Management Information Systems class and other classes, we’ve probably handed back two weeks of class time to the students and instructors,” said Peregoodoff, who says that more and more instructors are making the switch from traditional approaches to presentation giving and grading.

Panopto is even helping instructors at Sauder experiment with new pedagogical approaches to further student learning, including blended learning and the flipped classroom approach. These modern spins on traditional teaching use video to share all or part of the lecture with students before class, freeing up classroom time for discussion, group activity, and interactive exercises based on what the students will have already learned. At Sauder, 30 to 40% of classes make use of these models — with Panopto making it easy to record and share the video lectures that make them possible.

The Latest Idea: Video Proctoring

With the word about the system spreading throughout the school, Sauder is exploring completely different use cases as well. One that they’re particularly excited about is video proctoring — recording students during exams.

Some exams at Sauder are “open book” and “open Internet,” which sometimes means questions can arise as to whether students staying within the acceptable guidelines for gathering information. As a result, some instructors are exploring the idea of using Panopto to record each of the students’ actions during the tests — a previously unheard-of ability made possible by Panopto’s unlimited screen capture feature.

Panopto’s ability to record multiple video sources simultaneously allows the school to use a combination of webcam and screen recording to easily monitor the students’ open documents, browser windows and anything else being accessed during the session in a single video feed. If any questions of fairness should arise, the video feed is available for review.

Bringing Everything Into View

As Sauder School of Business discovered, creating a student presentation laboratory is no small task. But with the right video platform, most of the work was done for them — before they even got started.

Today, 800-900 students participate each year in the classroom experience that the Learning Services Unit developed. As a result, school officials are confident that their students are now better presenters — and more prepared than ever for the many business challenges they’ll be presented with throughout their careers.